I knit. I quilt. I spin, sew, weave, crochet, bake, run and garden too. I'm basically Martha Stewart, but without the whole audience thing. (I'm totally kidding- this is just the blog of a 20-something yarn junkie)

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Feel-Good Knitting

The thing about knitting when knitting is your life (and it pretty much is) is that it's easy for it to crash and burn because of one little tiny repeat. When you sell yarn for work, knit for fun, write about knitting in hopes of being published it starts to put on a little pressure on something that started out just being fun.

The day after I sent in my entry form for the Indiana State Fair, I noticed a little flub in my green silk lace shawl. Okay...more than a little flub. One side was 22 stitches longer than the other side. So I frogged it. Okay. That's a lie. I took it off the needles and stretched it out, hoping to find the exact point where I began to create these extra 22 stitches. And after about an hour of searching, pinning, swearing and searching some more, I came to the realization that I have no flippin' idea where I went so wrong. But I'm guessing a martini had something to do with it. I put the shawl (which needs to be done, blocked, and at the fairgrounds by July 25th) in a big bag in a dark corner and grabbed some scrap baby blanket yarn. I have no idea why, but when I have screwed up so epically (doesn't make a difference if I screwed up in knitting, in school, in relationships, or anything else) I feel the need to cast on. So I chained 4 in the bulkiest, ugliest baby yarn ever and just went. I crocheted, and crocheted, and when I ran out of yarn I grabbed the next partial ball and kept going and then suddenly I looked down and POW! A Project Linus blanket. Okay, it was a little more time-consuming than that, but it only took a few hours and I have cleared up a little more room in my stashroom/sanctuary. Oh yeah, and helping kids is a good feeling too.

Then I kept going. I made an 8x8 square for T's charity that collects squares and puts them in to blankets for parents that have lost children. Turns out that good feeling was more than just cold medicine.

So I took that feeling and I kept going. I cast on a chemo hat for my mom's friend, D. I grabbed the softest yarn I could find that wouldn't fuzz all over the place and found a pattern I liked. It's a little lacey, a little cabley, and all good juju.

And since I'm still a little angry at the green silk lace shawl for getting itself in to such a mess, I'm going to keep adding on those little bitty squares to my mitred square blanket until I feel like I've casted on enough for a while.

*In case you're wondering about the ugly sock yarn blanket:

1. There is a plan

2. That plan is to make each of the two pieces at least one more column wide and two more rows long. Then I will connect them mitre-style at the middle points there. That way I don't have to seam it. I'll just keep squaring out from the middles on each side until it's a square. I promise to show more details when I get there.

3. Pay someone to weave in the ends for me. That's crapload of ends that I probably should have been weaving in the whole time. But yeah...that's not happening. If I were a smart knitter (and I think we've made it very clear that I'm not) then I would weave in all the ends before I connected the pieces and made....you guessed it- more ends.

4. Applied I-cord edging in a solid color.

5. I'm serious about that paying someone to weave in those ends. Or I'd make you a sweater or something. Anybody?